Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
PART ONE - THE LAST PATROL
TUESDAY, AUGUST 25
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 26
THURSDAY, AUGUST 27
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28
SATURDAY, AUGUST 29
PART TWO - RELOADING WITHOUT BULLETS
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 1
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 2
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
PART THREE - OUTLIERS AMONG US
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 5
Acknowledgements
ALSO BY C. J. BOX
THE JOE PICKETT NOVELS
Below Zero
Blood Trail
Free Fire
In Plain Sight
Out of Range
Trophy Hunt
Winterkill
Savage Run
Open Season
THE STAND-ALONE NOVELS
Three Weeks to Say Goodbye
Blue Heaven
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Copyright © 2010 by C. J. Box
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Box, C. J.
Nowhere to run/C. J. Box.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-19656-4
1. Pickett, Joe (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Game wardens—Fiction. 3. Wyoming—Fiction. I. Title. PS3552.O87658N’.54—dc22
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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For Mark Nelson
And Laurie, always . . .
PART ONE
THE LAST PATROL
In no other country in the world is the love of property keener or more alert than in the United States, and nowhere else does the majority display less inclination toward doctrines which in any way threaten the way property is owned.
—ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, Democracy in America
TUESDAY, AUGUST 25
1
THREE HOURS AFTER HE’D BROKEN CAMP, REPACKED, AND pushed his horses higher into the mountain range, Wyoming game warden Joe Pickett paused on the lip of a wide hollow basin and dug in his saddlebag for his notebook. The bow hunters had described where they’d tracked the wounded elk, and he matched the topography against their description.
He glassed the basin with binoculars and noted the fingers of pine trees reaching down through the grassy swale and the craterlike depressions in the hollow they’d described. This, he determined, was the place.
He’d settled into a familiar routine of riding until his muscles got stiff and his knees hurt. Then he’d climb down and lead his geldings Buddy and Blue Roanie—a packhorse he’d named unimaginatively—until he could loosen up and work the kinks out. He checked his gear and the panniers on Roanie often to make sure the load was well balanced, and he’d stop so he and his horses could rest and get a drink of water. The second day of riding brought back all the old aches, but they seemed closer to the surface now that he was in his mid-forties. Shifting his weight in the saddle toward the basin, he clicked his tongue and touched Buddy’s sides with his spurs. The horse balked.
“C’mon, Buddy,” Joe said. “Let’s go now, you knucklehead.”
Instead, Buddy turned his head back and seemed to implore Joe not to proceed.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Go.”
Only when he dug his spurs in did Buddy shudder, sigh, and start the descent.
“You act like I’m making you march to your death like a beef cow,” Joe said. “Knock it off, now.” He turned to check that his packhorse was coming along as well. “You doing okay, Blue Roanie? Don’t pay any attention to Buddy. He’s a knucklehead.”
But on the way down into the basin, Joe instinctively reached back and touched the butt of his shotgun in the saddle scabbard to assure himself it was there. Then he untied the leather thong that held it fast.
IT WAS TO HAVE BEEN a five-day horseback patrol before the summer gave way to fall and the hunting seasons began in earnest—before a new game warden was assigned the district to take over from Joe, who, after a year in exile, was finally going home. He was more than ready.
He’d spent the previous weekend packing up his house and shed and making plans to ride into the mountains on Monday, descend on Friday, and clean out his state-owned home in Baggs for the arrival of the new game warden the first of next week. Baggs (“Home of the Baggs Rattlers!”) was a tough, beautiful, raggedy mountain town as old as the state itself. The community sprawled through the Little Snake River Valley on the same unpaved streets Butch Cassidy used to walk. Baggs was so isolated it was known within the department as the “warden’s graveyard”—the district where game wardens were sent to quit or die. Governor Spencer Rulon had hidden Joe there for his past transgressions, but after Rulon had won a second term in a landslide, he’d sent word through his people that Joe was no longer a liability. As luck had it, at the same time, Phil Kiner in Saddlestring took a new district in Cody and Joe quickly applied for—and received—his old district north in the Bighorns in Twelve Sleep County, where his family was.